November 23: Who are we fighting in Syria?

WHAT is the difference between the Russians (by proxy) destroying a civilian airliner in eastern Ukraine, killing innocent civilians, and a terrorist unit destroying a Russian civilian airliner over the Sinai Desert in Egypt, killing innocent civilians?

Nothing really, except the Russians are better at recognising other nations’ explosive chemicals than their own.

Do we have such short memories in today’s modern world of mass media and instant news coverage (which gets boring after the 10th time of telling) that we can forget about the Russian atrocity, in the ‘greater good’ of fighting against Islamic State?

How long will it take us to forget about the Paris atrocities, in the same way that we forgot about Chechnya, Gaza, Mumbai?

Or are these deaths now as nought, in the greater battle to defeat the so-called Islamic State?

To defeat IS will require the removal of recruits and funding; not to try and destroy it on the battlefield.

Until we can stop Saudi Arabia and Iran and parts of North Africa supplying fighters and finance to the terrorists, we should spend our budget on better border security, rather than putting bombs on Tornadoes and Typhoons.

If our own ‘citizens’ leave the country, don’t let them back in. And don’t trust the Russian government.

From: J G Riseley, Harcourt Drive, Harrogate.

LET us be clear about the migrant crisis. Whatever we offer to refugees, migrants or adventurers who turn up uninvited, we must be prepared to give to everyone in the world who wants the same.

This is as true today as when the Archbishop of Canterbury advised Ethelred the Unready to pay danegeld. The wilfully feeble minded can ignore it and carry on simply trying to be nice to people, but they cannot refute it or escape its consequences.

If what we are offering appears to be the prospect of the new arrivals, or indeed their children, infiltrating the western economy, then that is sufficient attraction for hundreds of millions of people to emulate their journey.

This does not end until the living standards of Europe have been levelled down to those of the poorest places on Earth so that no one else wants to come. By that time the indigenous population of Europe would be only a fraction of the new total.

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